 Hello and welcome. I'm going to visit. I am a member of the Buddhist Peace Action Remark group that is sponsoring this forum tonight. And it is good to see all of you here, fellow seekers and people who are interested in living more simply and sustainably. We are too, and we're all here to have a conversation about that. Before we begin, I will ring the bell. Be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free from fear. May all beings be free from suffering. In the Buddhist traditions, our awareness extends beyond people to all beings. And this is really key to our discussion tonight and our awareness tonight of all beings, which includes animals, insects, the soil, maybe the whole universe. The environment is not out there. It's in us, and we are in it. And we've gotten into a lot of trouble by thinking that the environment is out there. We will be hearing first of all from three people who are living in different ways simply and sustainably. Then we will have a break where you can have some refreshments, look at the books. And we have some sign-up sheets. I'll say more about that later. After the break, we will have some short, small group exercise to ask each of us to think about one change we intend to make, life to make it more simple and more sustainable. And then we will open the floor for discussion. Questions, comments from the audience, to the speakers. The speakers want a dialogue among themselves. Whatever is on your mind, we will be ending the evening with that discussion. There will be more detailed introductions, but let me just tell you briefly who's up here. There is Ben Hewitt, who homesteads with his family in northern Vermont. And he is the author of five books, including The Nourishing Homestead. And my copy is Beth there. It is not for sale. It is not for loan. Everything's for sale. My experience. And in the middle here is Beth Pereira, who is a certified food for life instructor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And she teaches about the power of plant-based nutrition. And next to me is Simon Dennis, who is co-founder of Transition Town White River Junction, where he directs a residential center based on sustainable living. And now I will let the speakers speak. And Laurie Beach will introduce Simon Dennis. I'm very pleased to introduce Simon Dennis to you all. Simon is a community organizer. He founded and directed a service organization of volunteers to make home repairs for elderly and disabled people. Or recently, he co-founded a residential sustainability center called the Center for Transformational Practice, where he currently lives in White River Junction. The mission of this center is to support the transition to a just and sustainable culture by advancing inner transformation as the basis for positive social change. The Center for Transformational Practice homestead is on a two-acre parcel of land just outside of downtown White River Junction. This once-neglected house and land is becoming a permaculture gardening and sustainable technology demonstration site. It's a home for a community. It includes 260 linear feet of human mounds, a free-fur-lit picking, orchard and berry patch, 7,000 square feet of annual garden, three labyrinths for walk-eating meditation. The homestead has two houses designed for seven adults, well-insulated and ecologically heated, with a wood-fired boiler and a rocket-mass heater. Perhaps I'm not the only one. If you wish to learn more about permaculture of human mounds and rocket-mass heaters, please welcome Simon Dennis. A wonderful speaker who could each speak for an hour and inform us so much, but we are limiting them for 20 minutes so that we can hear. Very different perspectives and experiences with living, sustainably, and simply. And Nettle has a little bell, and at the end of 20 minutes, you will hear the little bell chock-a-chock, which is time to wind down. Thank you. Thank you to the organizing committee for inviting me out to speak with you this evening. It's lovely to be here, and it's also nice once in a while to have a reason to kind of pull your thoughts together into some sort of coercive narrative. So as was said, my name's Simon Dennis, and I come to you from the Center for Transformational Practice in White River Junction, where I live with six other adults and one child, and we advance a mission of advancing inner transformation as the foundation for positive social change. So I'm gonna speak with you this evening about the inner dimensions of sustainability, which I think should be a comfortable terrain for the Buddhist practitioners among us. And I'm thinking in part and just to start off with reference to the first line of the Dhammapada, where it is said that phenomena are preceded by the heart, governed by the heart and made of the heart. That's a fairly close translation from Tennisirubiku. And I think it's worth starting off with that because sustainability also is a phenomenon, just like everything else, the lack of sustainability also is a phenomenon. And so if we were to follow the Buddhist teachings, we would say, you know, recognize that to get to the foundation of this phenomena, the basis of it can only be found in the inner dimensions of consciousness. So that's what I wanna speak to. And also mention that the word sustainability sometimes gets a little bit of a bad rap. So I've heard the critique of sustainability. People ask, well, what are you trying to sustain? Or as if the word sustainability somehow has this aspect of reinforcing the status quo. And personally, I never really bought into that argument at all about the word. I think we need to keep the word because to me it means something very, very radical, radical new economy, radical new way of living and radical new way of thinking. And partly we can say we've learned that it's radical from the science of eco-footprinting. And I'll just go over briefly a basic argument from that. Eco-footprinting tells us that we have 13 billion productive hectares of land on the planet and seven billion people. And so if you divide 13 billion by seven billion, you get just under two, which is our rightful allotment of global hectares to supply everything we need to produce. And some people will say, well, that's okay. My house is on a quarter acre lot, so I'm all right there. But actually the two global hectares has to supply everything that we would consume, including our laptop computer, including all of our clothing, including our cup, including our health insurance and what have you. And also, importantly, including all of the mechanisms, the support and the machines that it takes to create those things. So if you add it all up, the average American is living on something like 11 global hectares of land. In other words, about five times our rightful share. Put that another way, if everyone on the planet lived as we in North America do, we would need five planets to support us all. So I take from that that sustainability involves something like a five-fold reduction. It's actually more than that. That's a fairly conservative estimate, but we can kind of start there and think about what would be included in a economy which is 20% of our current consumptiveness. So a lot of things do not fit within this kind of economy and everyone would have their own list, but certainly the advertising industry does not fit. And the entertainment industry, Hollywood probably does not fit. And we can ask questions about what happens to health insurance and higher education and foreign policy and then things closer to home are marble countertops or our tile floor or a trip that I'm gonna take later to another part of the US does not fit. Everyone owning their own car does not fit. So from this standpoint, we can say, when I say sustainable, you can think radical. This is a dramatic departure from life as we know it. And that radicality also applies to our thinking. And so I wanted to just share with you a couple of stories that were brought to me by some of my friends that ended up initiating a little bit of a shift in my own thinking about sustainability. I have a friend named Mark Grable. Mark Grable is a carpenter and he's a tool sharpener, an expert tool sharpener. And so one day we said, Mark, would you please come to us and give us a workshop on how to sharpen tools? And he agreed to it and arrived with his pickup truck and sat cross-legged in the back of his pickup truck and we gathered around the back, maybe 12 or 15 of us. And he began his workshop like this. He said, friends, you all have heard of subsistence farming. Well, I am a subsistence carpenter myself. And that means I subsist off of the earnings of my carpentry labors, which for me is about $5,000 a year. And so this couple of years ago, I've forgotten most of what he had taught us about tool sharpening, but for some reason I remember this opening because I remember my reaction to it, which was a little bit like, oh, did he just admit something to us that he should feel funny about? Or how should we respond to this? Piece of information that he's given us. He is now, he is off the bottom of the poverty charts here as you can think about it. And pretty quickly I was starting to realize, well actually, what was just shared is something really special. I know why he said that. He said that because he's standing up to model the future. That's the model sustainability. This is actually an income that could be, you could live on that on your two, on your two global hectares of land. And there's a pretty close relationship between income and what you spend. And there's a pretty close relationship between what you spend and your carbon impact on the planet. And so pretty much if you were, if you're in the 30, 40, $50,000 income or expenditures in a given year, you might be doing a lot of things that we associate with sustainability, but chances are you're probably not getting very close to what could be considered a sustainable lifestyle. So it's a good thing to keep that in mind with regards to how we conceptualize sustainability. Mark Grable has a friend named Carl Rosengrant. Carl's also a friend of mine and he was living with us at the Center for Transformational Practice up until the beginning of last year. He moved out to go start his own intentional community called Smallfoot. And from time to time, Carl comes back to us and visits and does his laundry and takes a shower. And he says, the last time he came by, he said, so I figured out how I can live on $300 a month. I said, wow, $300 a month. And there's a little part of me that was saying something like, well, yeah, but you gotta be your laundry and your shower here, so maybe it doesn't all balance out or whatever. After I got thinking about that situation, I was like, actually, you know, again, Carl's here, he's modeling interdependence. And I'm stuck in this mindset that's like, no, everybody has to have their own. Gotta have your own lawnmower. Gotta have your own cars. Gotta have your own facilities. Gotta have every single tool that you need to accomplish, every task that you wanna do. This sort of rugged individualism mindset that we've kind of, is part of our, is part of understanding. And the mere ask, if someone's showing up and asking for help with something they don't have, sort of seems like, oh, there aren't a loss and they've gotta get their thoughts in a line or whatever it is. Signal to me that I need to make a little bit of an adjustment in my own thinking. And I do live in a one car household and I have to borrow cars from time to time and I do give myself a good talking to, like I gotta get organized and get myself, so I don't have to be dependent on my other housemates and that type of thing. But I think it's also a really good exercise to consider what it does to community. You could consider next time you're baking something in your house and you discover that you're missing some ingredient that you need in order to complete it. Instead of hopping in your car and driving to the store, you can say, well, what if I hop to my neighbor's house and knock on their door and say, could I need some eggs? Can you please give me some eggs or whatever, I'll pay you back later to see what that does to you. See what that feels like. And maybe also see what it does to your community, your sense of community. Another person that's impacted, experience I had just recently that's impacted my understanding of sustainability. One of my housemates, Kyle Barrett, went on a water fast last week, actually. Pretty rainy week and it was a four day water fast. He was doing a solo in the woods with another, with a group of men, they were all separate. And at the end of the water fast, we were had a ceremony to recognize their efforts and to welcome them back into society, the civilization as it were. And there was a lot of really tender and beautiful things were shared at that ceremony. And one observation was made by a woman who's not on the fast, but she was saying, how is it that here we are in the presence of all of these incredibly tender-hearted men that are speaking in such a vulnerable way and that are showing such care for one another? How did this happen? And I think the assumption was, well, we're all here together for this fast. You know, the fast has done this to them or whatever. But a day later I started thinking about it and I realized, you know, this men's fast is actually built out of a women's fast. And the women's fast had been proceeding and some of the founders of the women's fast were there. And so all of the men that were participating in this women's fast were to some extent participating in a matriarchal lineage. We were all fitting into that value system. And it completely shifted the dynamic of what could be shared in the way everyone was going to behave. So that also has stuck in my mind as part of the transition that is sustainability. And incidentally, I just want to loop back to the example that Carl was setting with regards to cutting through this ideal of the rugged individual. I think we have to recognize that in a culture where the resources have been garnered at the expense of and on the backs of exploited populations, marginalized populations through slavery, through genocide, that this notion of the rugged individual and the notion of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, and is part and parcel and part of the neglect of what we could call white supremacist society. There is a way in which we need to cut through the patterns of white supremacy. We think of white supremacy as something that's only practiced by some neo-fascists off of North Carolina or something like that, but actually it's sort of woven into the structures of our society. And breaking through that is also essential to sustainability. Last thing I want to mention with regards to mental transition is hearkening back to this quote by the Buddha saying that all phenomena are born of mind, are born of heart. It's worth recognizing that that is a philosophical position and a cosmological position. And it's one that runs counter to our current mainstream understandings of the way this world works. In other words, our current standard narrative, our standard story upon which everything is built is that consciousness and thought are byproducts or epiphenomenon of neurons firing in the synapses of our brain, right? So we have a bit of a reversal here with regards to our fundamental story. And another name for this philosophy is materialistic philosophy. Materialistic philosophy is often mistaken for reality itself, but if we look at its history and if we look at the way that it has evolved, materialistic philosophy is actually just a way of looking at the world that is becoming outdated. Materialism was a great model for ushering humanity through the industrial revolution and it worked very well for helping to create the technological wonders that we live with and work with today. However, materialist philosophy is not a great model for ushering society into the sustainable culture of the future. And so, and furthermore, I guess I'll just add to that for those that kind of missed the memorial service for philosophical materialism, it's also true that the frontiers of science have been dismantling it for about 100 years now in various different ways and that's a wonderful thing to look into. But the basic gist of it is that this belief about the world which is very, very deeply held belief is something that needs to shift in order for us to be able to move forward into a sustainable culture. All of these things are actually very deep, very deeply held notions about the way this world works and who we are as individuals and as a people. It's actually to get to the bottom of the story about sustainability, we have to go deeper still. And the reason I say this is that the transition from, let us say, patriarchal culture to matriarchal culture or the transition from white supremacist culture to a culture which centers the marginal perspective, the marginalized perspective or a culture which is based on a philosophy of materialism, the shift from there to a philosophy which recognizes the phenomenal world as arising from consciousness. These are not horizontal shifts. This is not sideways movement. There is an aspect of ascent in each one of these. Same thing is true for the breakdown of the notion of the rugged individualism of society. This is all involving a vertical lift of mind. And this is the kind of experience that we're actually all very, very familiar with. Mind is constantly rising up and falling down as we go through our day, as we go through our lives. Our mind, human mind kind of opens up to recognize the interconnectedness of this world and respond to it and include broader horizons of community. We include the global south. We include other species. We include future generations. And then mind kind of has a way of retreating back down to thinking, no, my community is only those living under my roof or those that are just like me. I think we don't notice it. But mind goes through these fluctuations. Another example is mind opens up to thinking very long term about the needs of the next generation or the seventh generation, if you will. Or mind also retracts to a position of thinking towards immediate gratification for maybe myself or just those that are close to me. Everybody has had the experience of kind of standing back and looking at the world and seeing it as a web, a massive interconnected field of which we are apart. And later, maybe later that week or later that day thinking, no, actually, I'm actually separate from everybody else. I'm a separate being this type of thing. So mind's constantly going through this type of these kinds of patterns. And this rise and fall of mind is the foundation of our ability to transition our thinking in the different ways that I've mentioned. Okay, think about poverty differently. Think about interdependence differently to loosen up on some of our kind of intractable, deeply held beliefs about the way the world works. So last thing, I guess what I'd like to do in closing is just take for a moment to reference some of the things that we all do, not just we in this room, but everybody does to foster and facilitate the rising up of our own mind. Maybe this goes out beyond the realms of what we normally consider religion or what we'd normally consider spiritual practice even. But I'm thinking of things like taking a walk in the rain or taking a walk in nature or corresponding with family or lovingly preparing healthy food and sharing it with others. Or taking a moment to say prayer of gratitude before taking food, going to synagogue or church or temple at the end of the week, setting aside some portion of the day for engaging in a practice of learning to rest one's mind, taking care of the elderly, the dying, taking care of the children. A lot of these things we associate with women's work somehow. It's fundamental practices of society by means of which society is lifted up and by means of which consciousness is lifted up. These practices, to my understanding, are the axis around which our survival as a race and our extinction revolves. These practices are the deciding factor. So they also are the foundation of our ability to come together in a place like this and have a conversation and share things and hear one another come together. So thank you. Ben Hewitt has written or has published between 2011 and 2015 five books. And I will just, by way of introduction, give you the titles and subtitles of those books because they tell a lot about his life. And I recommend the books. Sorry, I don't know which came first, but I am going to prove it. Well, hide your eyes. One more piece, The Town That Food Saved, how one community found vitality in local food. And that community was hard with, and I knew hard with pretty well from working in the schools there. So I picked up my ears and very soon there was another book called Making Supper Safe. One man's quest to learn the truth about food safety. And believe me, you need to have a strong stomach if you are going to read that book. In 2013, Ben came out with Sage, how I quit worrying about money and became the richest guy in the world. It didn't work. Yeah. In 2014, he came out homegrown. Adventures in parenting off the beaten track, unschooling and reconnecting with the natural world. And finally a book that is on display over there with other books and authors' materials. The nourishing homestead, one back to the land family's plan for cultivating soil, skills, and spirit, which he wrote with his wife, Tanya. So thank you all of you. So thank you and thank you to the folks who organized this and put all this effort into. Thank you to Simon. It's always, I know from experience, very difficult to leave these things off, so much appreciation for that wonderful talk. I'm about to present to you an articulation and perhaps a visual and oral articulation of the most complex, least sustainable, simple, sustainable life that I know how to live, if that makes any sense, which is to say that this life to me is actually very, very complicated and complex and the further and deeper I get into it, the more complex it gets. And I recognize one of the things I'm always key to talk about are all the ways in which it truly is not actually all that sustainable. Some of which Simon articulated very, very well, so thank you for heading that discussion in a way that I would love to continue to further. I'm all on to start with just, anytime I have an opportunity to share my favorite poem in the world, I take it. I have that opportunity right now and it's a beautiful night of evening that reminds me of this poem, so I'm gonna share that with you first before I get into my talk. This is a poem called The Cows at Night by Hayden Grooth. Is anyone familiar with it? Oh, that's such a, one of those. The rest of it, it's such a pleasure to be able to introduce people to this poem, so thank you for that opportunity. The moon was like a full cup tonight, too heavy and sank in the mist soon after dark, leaving for light faint stars and the silver leaves of milkweed beside the road, gleaming before my car. Yet I liked driving at night in summer and in Vermont, the brown road through the mist of mountain dark, among farms so quiet and the roadside willows opening out where I saw The Cows. Always a shock to remember them there, those great breathings close in the dark. I stopped and took my flashlight to the pasture fence. They turned to me where they lay sad and beautiful faces in the dark and I counted them 40 near and far in the pasture, turning to me sad and beautiful like girls very long ago who were innocent and sad because they were innocent and beautiful because they were sad. I switched off my light, but I did not want to go, not yet, nor knew what to do if I should stay for how in that great darkness could I explain anything, anything at all. I stood by the fence and then very gently, it began to rain. I love that poem, I love cows. I'll talk about cows a little bit. So, as Glenda mentioned, I live with my family on way more acres than we should be allocated in standard Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom. We have 100 acres of field and forest, mostly forest, but some field. We raised and have been doing for many years about 90-ish percent of the calories we consume that does not make what we do sustainable by any long shot. Just a couple days ago, we received in the mail like combustion technology, a new batch of broiler chickens for the brooder, which I fed grain that came from the feed store delivered by truck and harvested by combine. So I want to make it really clear, right, that just because we raise so much of our food, just because we have in many ways a very low light impact relative to the contemporary American lifestyle. For instance, we consume about four kilowatt hours of electricity daily. That includes four chest freezers that we maintain to store a lot of our food. And that's the average American family for us is about 30 kilowatt hours. So just because there are aspects of our life that perhaps are a step in the right direction, there's a lot of contradiction. And a lot of things about our lifestyle that we don't have figured out and that don't really work for a truly sustainable, durable future. I just want to make that really, really clear, okay? So I'm going to show you a lot of pretty pictures. It's going to make it seem like we've got it all taken out. But it ain't true. This is a view of our place. It's a small house, it's 1,200 square feet. We built it. It is heated solely by wood. And one of the things that I find really interesting about trying to establish this sort of lifestyle is all the ways in which the systems that sort of have impact over our lives actually really sort of, it's always conspire against us. And I'm thinking most recently about trying to get a home insurance quote for our place. So we'd be covered in the event of a fire. And the list of questions that I had to sort of deal with when they learned that we had wood heat, such as did a professional install it? When was the last time your stove was inspected? No, I installed it and I inspected it. But none of this was good enough. So I'm not falsely insurance company. I'm sure they have their metrics that tell them that I'm a much greater liability. I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of barriers sort of built into the arrangements that are sometimes kind of invisible. We don't even realize we're there. But they are very real. And they have a very real profound impact on how we are able to sort of conduct ourselves and live our lives. So that's just one, I know I only have 20 minutes. So it'll probably sort of blow past a lot of the points I really want to make. But that's one of them. Let's just put it over our barn, simple barn, I love the barn, yes. The barn is bigger than the house, that's really important to me, I don't know why, but seems like the right order of things. Another view of the house. So we do grow, like I said, an overwhelming quantity, or not an overwhelming, that sounds really, really, really preposterous. It's not an overwhelming quantity. We grow the majority of our own food. A lot of the ways in which we're able to do this is because we have made certain dietary choices. And those dietary choices do not include a lot of cereal grains. They do not include a lot of fruit in the winter, but that which we're able to freeze in our own freezers. They don't even include a lot of fresh greens in the winter. We eat a lot of fermented foods that we've been able to store during the summer and put up for winter. Our diet is very heavily dependent on pasteurized meats and dairy, a lot of animal fats, saturated animal fats. So if anyone is still thinking that fat is what makes you fat, I'm here to tell you that someone whose diet is probably about 60 to 70% saturated animal fats, I can assure you that is not the case. Eating, consuming fat does not make new fat, just to be clear. We follow this diet in part because we believe it to be healthiest for us. And I speak to someone who did follow a vegetarian diet for a long time, although I think not very well. I think there are a lot of different ways to follow different diets. And I'm not sure that I did a very good job with that. So I may not be the best person to speak to that. But because we feel like it's the best diet for us health-wise and also because actually we believe it to be the most sustainable diet. And I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more in more detail. I wanna say that I have absolutely no argument with anybody's dietary choices. And I think that anyone who is making specific dietary choices that may actually be very different than mine, I have a lot of respect for because they are actually consciously thinking about their impacts on the world. And they may come to a different conclusion and that is fine, right? That is absolutely fine. This is the conclusion that we have come to. So, but diet and food, I mean this is a huge part of our lives. So we spend a lot of our days cultivating, processing food, we spend a lot of our days working around our place, the barn, the house, they were built with lumber, a lot of lumber that we saw from logs coming out of our woods. This is kind of what we spend a lot of our time basically paying ourselves to do the work that a lot of people pay other people to do in our society. Some of these, this was a talk that I had done for another audience, so some of these may not be terribly relevant to tonight, but some of them are. There is our small herd of cows. I believe that cows are probably my favorite animal. If I had to choose one, I love her cows. This is another aspect I believe of living this life and also in our diet is the relationship that we have with our animals, which is incredibly intimate and meaningful to us. So chores every day, it's a huge part of my life. It means a lot to me. Oh yes, this is what I'm talking about. That to me is a holy grail. The arrow is pointing to the cream line in that milk. So skim milk, for those of you who aren't aware, is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, right? The basically the food industry skims off all the nutrition in the form of cream, turns it into a value added product like butter and then sells you the swill that I consider barely fit to feed to our pigs. We don't actually drink a lot of milk. We mostly just drink cream. And that's actually the truth, the gospel truth. And this to me is also the holy grail which is cream that's too thick to pour. That is a jar of cream turned upside down with no lid on it and it won't pour. That is an excellent sign that you are on the road. It's a good health and nutrition. We make our own butter out of that cream. I was talking about, we do saw a lot of lumber out of softwood logs. It's a very dangerous task to make your children do it. We do quite a bit of foraging in the woods around our house. Again, I'm sort of like, I really just want to keep emphasizing the point that most of this stuff, I'm not sitting here telling you that this is a perfectly sustainable life. It's not, it truly is not. I also really appreciated Simon's comments about interdependence because there is sort of this mythology of the self-sufficient homestead which I think is just really tragic and honestly just to me feels really, really sad. And I really, really value the relationships and interdependence that we have with our friends and neighbors, some of whom are living similar lifestyles, some of whom are not, but most of whom which we have reciprocal arrangements around shared labor, shared equipment, shared tools, all of that kind of stuff. We're really fortunate here in Vermont that we still have the attached communities, small trusting communities where that is possible because that is something that's really, really being lost to that sort of same sort of rugged individualist, sort of idealized notion of self-sufficiency which I think is fatally flawed. And actually Rears has had a lot around homesteading, this idea that if you could raise enough of your own food, provide your own firewood, if you're selling your own lumber, your son has self-sufficient and therefore not dependent on others. I'm not used to that at all, frankly. Totally not used to that. Those are, and again, I'm just sort of showing you some different stuff we do. Those are acorns drying in the sun, and sometimes when I say we, I actually mean my wife because I'm just, this just seems like way too much work for me, frankly, but she loves to make acorn flour out of forage acorns. You never appreciate wheat more than going to the store and buying wheat flour more than if you actually make some acorn flour because it is an insane amount of work, but it's actually really quite tasty. These are three different acorns from three different stages of processing. This, okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit more about, we did, as Glenda mentioned in the titles of my books, our children have not entirely, but in some ways been educated at home. Our younger child in particular is a really, really avid hunter and outdoorsman, a trapper or hunter and very, very skilled with like primitive, so-called primitive skills, traditional skills. This is all a long way of saying that this is beaver liver pate, and we were really blessed that he was able to be mentored by a trapper who believed in a high degree of reverence to the animal, which included the utilization of pretty much every part of that animal. This has resulted in a lot of woodchuck chili, muskrat sausage, the aforementioned beaver liver pate. Some of these things I'm okay with, some I frankly can't really get my mental head around, but that is the case in our house, that some of that is happening. This is actually the same time harvesting wild rice. We do actually consume and harvest a pretty substantial amount of wild rice. We only have to drive to Minnesota to get it, so again, not very sustainable, but it tastes really good. Those are, I think those are dried apples. Fermented foods, huge part of our diet. Any of you who are familiar with sort of gut ecology and the interior terrain of our bodies probably recognize the value in consuming fermented foods, and also the real tragedy of the sort of pasteurized, sterilized diet and food system that is bringing us to bulk of our calories. So really, really important to maintain our gut biology with fermented foods, and also to, if at all possible, avoid antibiotic use for those of you who aren't aware of this, probably most of you are. Well perennial food stuff, just a picture of things we're gonna plant somewhere that will probably not produce until after I'm dead, but that's a nice active phase, isn't it? A lot of berries, we do a lot of berries, gooseberries, currants, mulberries, in the bottom left-hand corner, anyone who's interested in like berries, plant yourself some mulberries, now a mulberry tree. By the way, forget about strawberries, we're way too much work, let somebody else grow the strawberries, that's what we do anyway. But these are all berries that we produce and process in our place. What's this red one here? The red one is a currant, yeah. Two different kinds of currants here, the red ones and the white ones, these are gooseberries, mulberries, oh, this one. Cabocha, more fermented stuff, fermented stuff is just like a really, really big part of what we do, I guess I've emphasized that probably enough. So I'm gonna say at this point that I actually, despite all my references to meat and dairy, I am prepared to sit up here and say and argue that we actually, as Beth I think is about to, we advocate for a plant-based diet. We just believe that allowing ruminant animals to pre-digest those plants for us is the best path in that direction. And by what I mean by that is that we don't feed grain to our ruminant animals, we let them eat, they survive on grass and forage solely and dry grass and forage in the form of hay. And the reason I consider that one of the most sustainable ways to possibly eat, there's a number of reasons. One, grass is the most abundant perennial food crop known to humankind. It's all, there's millions of acres out there that we're mowing every year, when it's absolutely possible to turn it in to a super nutritious and delicious human food with the benefit of ruminant animals. It requires no soil disturbance, you don't have to plow it up, you don't have to till it up, you don't have to destroy the soil communities, you don't have to damage all the insects and bugs, you don't have to protect it from predators like deer. To me, it's the most sustainable, it's the most abundant, we just need those ruminant animals to go and harvest it for us. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about sustainability around the meat and dairy-based diet. This is no excuse for the dominant meat, the dominant livestock industries at all. They're reprehensible from every standpoint. Let me be really, really clear about that. And I think the attention that is being paid to those industries and their sort of awakening around the damage they do is very, very valuable and really, really good. The problem is one of the unintended consequences in my mind is that there is not awareness necessarily that there is a different way of working with livestock. And so sometimes we throw the baby out with the bathwater unintentionally. I believe that's just one of those cases. Just because there are no other pictures of my wife, there's a picture of my wife, Penny, on top of the stack of hay. This is another example of sort of interdependence. We actually hay with two sisters who are in their closing in on 70 who run a farm. And we help them get up their hay and get it in their barn and then we are able to get hay in our barn. It's kind of a sweat after the exchange. Again, just the other thing I'll point out about livestock and one of the other reasons I really see it as being, for us at least, a sustainable choice is that we have forgotten, I think culturally, that not only is livestock prized for meat and dairy, but we have also forgotten about another thing that they contribute that's really, really critical to the feeding the land and growing other crops for human consumption, which is fertility. And what's happened is that as we have sort of segregated and separated and specialized livestock and brought them into an environment that's actually not natural for them, instead of allowing them to distribute their waste in a way that actually heals the land that will help us grow the other crops that we would like to eat, the vegetable, fruit, cereal crops, we create an enormous waste management problem and a real ethical demand, too, in my humble opinion. So yeah, it's not all about meat and dairy. We do consume other products, including vegetables and maybe something else, some of the meat products, so I didn't make my point very well today. We do a lot of dried meats, dry-care meats. This is a pork cut that has been salted and spiced and then hung to dry. It's not ever cooked, it's just sort of eventually dries to a point of consistency, palatability. Another way to take advantage of nutrition that is offered freely and another example, really, of the ways that we are all, in some level, participants in the death of other creatures. I want to make that really clear, too, is that other beings die so that we can live. No matter what, other beings die so that we can live. This is an example of a roadkill deer that I brought home to allow the boys to harvest, to butcher. Over the past six years, I've brought home five roadkill deer. I will put a lot of medicine in the freezer. See the bell coming? Okay, beautiful. A lot of my woodcook stove. Woodcook stove, this is how we heat our house. It's how we heat our water. It's how we dry our food. All of our hot water comes through the woodcook stove. It's heated by the woodcook stove through a jacket in the firebox. There you can see the coffee water tank that stores the hot water. It's syrup, maple sugar, even better. And I gotta go. My wife, Penny, pounding on them. She's really into basketry, pounding on a black ashcloth to make baskets. I really agree with a lot of what Simon's talking about in terms of the sort of relationship to this work and the sort of spiritual component of it. And I haven't really spoken much about that, but that is a huge part of what we're doing here, honestly, is cultivating that for ourselves and for our family as much as we are able to in our own humbling, perfect ways. But I know for Penny, this really includes this kind of work with her hands, making baskets, harvesting black ash logs, pounding them and making traditional crafts like this. That's a braided birch bark, plated birch bark that's a bag that she made. And see, I didn't have to get the bell run. That's the end. So, thank you all very much. And if you want to respond. Yeah, I would not. Wow, what amazing speakers did it so wonderfully. I hear of these new perspectives and the diversion points of view and to share all of this. It's been my honor to know Beth for many years that the reason we know each other is that we're both doing a workshop at an environmental conference in Middlebury. And my topic was sustainable population, which rarely is talked about. And my big issue, we need to have a sustainable population. And so I was doing a workshop in the same room that she was doing her workshop on vegetarian diet. And we just connected. She agreed with what I was saying and I agreed with what she was saying. I'm still not a strictly vegetarian, but I've moved in that direction. And Beth is just amazing, I think. She does workshops all over the place, including like a Dartmouth college. She walks the talk too. She moved out of state. I was sorry to see a few years ago. Then, a couple of years ago, came back. And is now in East Randolph. I was really glad to see her come back. And she's moving into not a tiny house, but a small house of 700 square feet. Good name, so I am moving again. She's wonderful. I know she's also very personally concerned about climate change. Deeply, deeply concerned about that. And we share a lot of similar emotions about that. So she is, I think, just a great person. Look forward to your talk. Thank you, Beth. Thank you. I'm Beth Pereira. I'm a certified food for life instructor as my initial introduction said. Thank you again, everybody. I just thank everybody, and I'm very thankful to be here. I'm rarely asked to talk about the sustainability side of food choices. And that's, so you're talking about lifestyles and homesteading and farms. And I'm talking about food choices as the bigger picture of sustainability. And this slide just shows some of my sources. Dr. Richard Oppenlander has been a huge influence on me. And I have a whole table full of books over there in DVDs. The littlest one, easiest to read. You can read it in a day. It's called Comfortably Unaware. What we choose to eat is killing us and our planet. And this is a must read for everybody who cares about the future of life on this planet. This is a great image that I stole from Naked Food Magazine, which is the only publication to which I subscribe, you know, put a bunny in front of a child in a piece, in a vegetable, and which one will they play with and which one will they eat? I've yet to see a baby take a bite out of a bunny. I borrowed this slide from my friend Jim Hicks, who travels all over the world giving his sustainability talks. And he sees these as the main four really big problems that we have to deal with over population, which is George's key issue, global economy, and stuff. We all have too much stuff. And I have moved, this will be my fourth move in about three years, and I have purged every single time I've moved. And I still have too much stuff to fit into a 700 square foot house. And by the way, it's gonna be a completely off-grid house, no electricity, no plumbing, composting toilet, so no freezer. I don't know how quite we're gonna, the winter's great, we have ice, but fossil fuel dependence and then our food choices is a biggie. And so I'm gonna tackle this in my 20 minutes from the health side, the nutrition side, our healthcare system. So the first several slides are just kind of the status quo of where we are with our healthcare system and the health of, I say Americans, but it's everybody eating kind of a westernized diet. The leading cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States is diet. It's more than smoking, it's more than accidents. It's diet and the biggest problem is that most physicians, most medical people deal with patients who are coming to them because of chronic illness, obesity, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and physicians get little or almost no nutritional training in med school. And I think a lot of people are just totally unaware of that, go to your physician and you ask, well, what should I be eating? Oh, just eat a healthy diet, whatever the heck that is. So we really are our own health advocates and everything I've learned is outside traditional medicine. This is a pretty startling fact. The US healthcare system is the third leading cause of death. So you wanna do your best to stay out of it. I don't have healthcare and that's by choice. I take $44 a month for an Affleck accident insurance policy which covers me for everything except disease. I'm probably not gonna get cancer and if I do, the alternative therapies I would choose wouldn't be covered by insurance anyway. So I have to pay for those anyway. I know how to eat my way out of diabetes out of all the chronic conditions which I'm probably not gonna get because of the way I eat. But look at all these numbers, the medical errors, the infections, you step into a hospital, I freak out if I have to visit somebody in the hospital, I just wanna wear a hazmat uniform. A lot of this is not good news but this is just the current state of affairs in the United States. One out of two men, one out of three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. And even for many oncologists, they'll say, oh, just eat what you want, you're gonna lose your appetite, more food the better, don't worry about what you're eating, just eat so you don't lose too much weight. Well, that's totally nonsense. There's a huge link, especially our most common cancers, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer are linked to, I'm sorry to say, but meaty diets just don't exist in cultures who don't eat meat and dairy. Heart diseases are number one killer for both men and women. Over 700,000 people a year have their first heart attack for about 400,000. It's a fatal heart attack. And notice there's one sentence in red, death is the most common first symptom. So for everybody in this room, consider yourself some of the lucky ones who are getting advanced notice that there is a way to prevent heart disease. There's a wonderful documentaries. If you have Netflix or Amazon Prime or anything like that, Forks Over Knives, Food Choices, one of my table bet there is just called Eating and it's now available free on YouTube. So if you have internet, you can watch Eating. This is like a 9-11 every day or every few days. That's how many people are dying of heart disease. And I chose this picture of Bob Harper. I don't watch TV, but he was the personal trainer for a reality show called The Biggest Loser which was morbidly obese people desperately trying to lose weight. And he was the very fit, buff, muscular trainer. And he died of a fatal heart attack last February only he's still alive, only because he was at his gym at the time on a treadmill. And when he had his fatal heart attack, there happened to be another physician on the treadmill next to him who had to use the defibrillators at the gym to jumpstart his heart again and then gave him CPR until the paramedics arrived. He had a fatal heart attack and that's what he looked like. So it's not so much what you look like on the outside but on the inside. I've always been slim, but I was a wreck physically. I ate junk growing up. I felt sorry for my friends who had bowls of fruit on their kitchen table because I had Pringles and Cheetos and peanut butter cups and orange crush at my house. I was a pretty sickly skinny kid, stomach aches all the time and my pediatrician never asked me or my mother once, what are you feeding this kid? They just, food is a disconnect. Diabetes, it's not just epidemic in our country but it's pandemic around the world because we are exporting our eating habits around the world. Sadly, it's completely preventable. Type two diabetes is a foodborne disease. You eat your way into it, you can eat your way out of it. And when I talk about a plant-based diet, I'm not just French fries or plant-based and potato chips are vegan but I'm talking about low-fat, whole-food plant-based fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and mushrooms. So it's really plant foods and fungus. It's what we need to be eating. And then we have our obesity epidemic, two out of three adults, more of our children. We have seven and eight year olds who are so obese they're being diagnosed with type two diabetes and just to go back to diabetes for a second, it used to be called adult onset diabetes but they've had to change the name because children now are diabetic and it doesn't have to be this way. And we are on the road to half the adult population having Alzheimer's by 2050 if we're around that long and it's just insane and you don't think about dementia as being related to food at all but clogged arteries in your heart will cause a heart attack. Clogged arteries to your brain cause a stroke. Lots of little strokes adds up to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And is there anybody in this room who doesn't know somebody or doesn't know a family who has dealt with this tragic disease where you just lose everything because you lose your memory. You don't know who your loved ones are anymore. It's sad but it's the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. So it is largely the food that's causing this completely unsustainable healthcare system, unsustainable, just financial burden. So my spiel is let food be your medicine. I stuck this slide in here because I just a couple of weeks ago listened to this mind blowing podcast. And I don't know if any of you are familiar with Ritual. If you've seen, there's a wonderful film on Netflix called What the Health but he went from couch potato. He was an attorney, hated it, couch potato, junk food addict. Couldn't hardly walk up the stairs in his home. And when he went plant based, he's now one of the world's most elite long distance endurance athletes doing ultra marathons and just doing incredible things. But anyway, so Ritual has a weekly podcast and interviews people all over the spectrum from meditation and yoga gurus to physicians who are helping heal the world. And this guy, Zach Bush, just had a mind blowing almost a two hour podcast. They just kept talking and talking but his topics were Monsanto and Roundup and Glyphosate, aluminum, leaky gut, autism, Alzheimer's cancer. So I encourage you to listen to that. This is just a mind blowing quote that I picked out of that podcast. Dr. Bush said, one thing we can be sure of no matter where you come from scientifically or politically, we can agree that any society faced with one in three children with autism will collapse under a financial blow that is inescapable and he estimates that we will be at that one in three children with autism within the next 15 years. Autism rates were one in 10,000 and then one in 5,000 and right now they're like one in 40 and it's mostly boys is for some reason there's a link with testosterone is, well I should say it conversely, estrogen seems to be a little more protective and not so much, so there's four times as many boys ending up with autism. So think about this, we're gonna have a population of children who are autistic and a population of adults who have Alzheimer's and the middle class, not the middle class, the middle aged group is gonna be left taking care of everybody and completely exhausted. So our food choices, the chemicals in our egg system are making us bankrupting our systems and destroying our planet, so none of this is sustainable. Here's my favorite doc, this is that book Comfortably Unaware, Dr. Richard Oppenlander. He was actually one of the speakers at the most recent climate summit in Paris so he pleaded, gave his just heart-wrenching presentation about food choices and we're killing our oceans and there's dead zones and so much of this is from animal agriculture and all the chemicals running into the oceans and we don't have to wait for governments, we don't have to wait for technology, you don't have to wait for elected officials to say we need to be eating plant-based, it's something you can start with you're very next bite, you're very next meal and we don't have that and I will say there's also on the table back there there's a film called Cowspiracy, it's on Netflix, it's incredible and that film's been out for a few years and I'm sure it was filmed a year before it came out. Well in the film he says we have about a three or four year window to turn this around. That's right now. So we don't have 20 years, 30 years, 50 years to turn this around, we just don't. These are some of the just staggering numbers. Every hour, because of our animal agriculture, flesh-consuming society, over eight million animals are slaughtered, four million tons of greenhouse gases emitted, 114,000 tons of grain are fed to livestock, 58,000 or more acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed and 354 children starve to death every hour of every day and all of these numbers if we lived in a sustainable world, all of these numbers would be zero. But they wouldn't be related to our food choices. So can we really change? We absolutely have to, I love this quote. Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. And I didn't grow up vegan. I grew up in a jump food household. I didn't change my diet until I was 47 and I'll be 57 at the end of this month. I ate everything, I'll say I ate every one. I went to a lecture who the speaker was talking about fish and animals as beings and the big, huge fishing nets that just scoop up everyone and he didn't say everything. He said everyone and that just struck me. So I used to eat everyone and now I don't but until I had some health problems I never ever considered modifying my diet. And for me, I was a cheeseaholic. I probably went through a couple pounds of cheese a week, just me. Cause it was cheese on whenever I went for breakfast and cheese on lunch and cheese on dinner and cheese and crackers for snack. And it got to the point where my toes just wouldn't bend anymore. Couldn't hardly walk, couldn't put shoes on. It was painful just to slide my feet under the covers at night. This is just, something's really wrong. And I wasn't, I asked around my family members and you know, I have one aunt and I'm like, oh, arthritis runs in the family. You're gonna have your knees replaced. You're gonna have your hips replaced. But she was 70 telling you this and I was 47 at the time. And I was like, I'm gonna be crippled by the time I'm 50. So that's when I really started looking around online and I was not vegan. So I wasn't looking at vegan medical sites or vegan food sites, but when I looked up, you know, I'm just thinking it was arthritis. I think it was probably gout. When I looked up, you know, joint pain inflammation. Everything said that dairy was the number one trigger for joint pain inflammation, arthritis, gout. Type 1 diabetes, migraines, athletes, list went on and I was mortified because I was probably literally addicted to cheese and butter and ice cream and cottage cheese. And just if it was dairy, it was in my fridge. But I, it was a pretty clear choice. Walk or keep eating cheese, you know, hide, keep eating cheese, dance, ski, you know, all that stuff, or keep eating cheese. So it wasn't overnight, it took about six months. But when I got all the dairy products out of my diet and over the course of those six months I got all the rest of the animal products out and my feet are fine. I can jump and dance and ski and cram my foot into a ski booth. All the stuff I wanna do. I don't wear high heels anymore, but I know what it is, those things. So it worked for me and then I was just so angry that I didn't know this sooner and that so many other people are suffering and that's when I started studying and I had certified as a in plant-based nutrition certified food for life instructor, certified in children's health, men's health, women's health, autism, cancer. Just only because there is not, I can't go back to college and get a degree in plant-based nutrition that doesn't exist. If I wanna go back and be a nutritionist or dietitian I have to sit through the meat and dairy lectures and I'm not willing to pay to do that. So this is a quote from Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee. If everyone in the US went vegan we could feed every American twice over using no additional resources. You're basically saying all the grain that's being fed to livestock is gonna go to people. So here's some pretty staggering numbers. This is comparing well how much food can we produce on just a single acre of land? Well you can't even raise one cow on one acre and need multiple acres for one cow. So this 137 pounds of beef is probably half or less of the beef you'd get from one cow versus 53,000 pounds of potatoes, 40,000 pounds of tomatoes. It's somewhere between five and 10,000 pounds of quinoa and kale. I mean how many people can you feed with tons and tons of veggies versus a little over 100 pounds of beef? It's healthier for people, feeds more people, it's better for the environment. You don't have to kill anyone. And I know the whole insect thing with the soil, I totally get that. And the animals would just love it. We love our animals, many of you probably have cats, dogs, mice, gerbils, hamsters, my daughter has a rat, I don't have any grandkids but I have a grand rat, named Trixie. We would never think to eat our pets because we love them, they're part of our family. And I can't remember whose quote this was and it might be Dr. Neal Barnard. He said, you know, we have this relationship with animals and it may seem like it's a 50-50 give and take but if the animals had the choice to opt out, they would. And I truly believe that. So our food choice is really related to a healthy planet. They really, really are. And without a healthy planet, I can't even watch the news anymore, I can't read news anymore because all of this distraction and nitpicking that's going on in the media, it's like time out, none of this matters if we don't have a healthy planet. Period, end of story. We have to take care of the environment or none of us will be here for the next election. Some of you may recognize this face. This is Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd. He has a small fleet of boats and they police the ocean trying to, you know, people who are wailing or killing dolphins illegally or going after endangered species. His estimate is that we will have an empty ocean devoid of life, one big dead zone in 2048. That's not very far away. That's our lifetime. We cannot push this forward another generation. And I just recently added to this slide because I read this number and I about fell off my chair. We're extracting 200 million sea creatures every hour from our oceans. Yet you can still go to the Oceana website which is supposed to be an organization that protects the ocean and they have safe food recipes on their website. Like what part of a sustainable ocean is eating fish? There's, you know, all fishing is over fishing. And then I just discovered this brilliant documentary on Netflix called A Plastic Ocean. Just I highly recommend that the numbers are staggering as much as just numerous times from each big city along the coast, just dumping plastic every single day into our oceans. These are some of the, oh my gosh, no way. Okay. No. In summary, there is no planet B. I think Simon was saying that we are consuming enough that we need five planets and we only have one. So we have to way cut back our consumption. And some of you may have heard the phrase, you know, infinite growth, you know, this economy has to grow and we need to grow and grow and grow. Well, there's no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet. We have this many resources, but we're using this many. So it's time to just cut back and get realistic about this. So thank you very much. You want the lights on? Simon. We will now have a little break sponsored by a politically active Buddhist group or people who are akin to Buddhists called the Buddhist Peace Action Vermont. If you are interested in attending our meetings, we need both to read and discuss, thank you. What we can do in this world to try and make some changes in line with our philosophy and Buddhist teachings. We also present events such as this forum every spring we have a forum on a current issue with some Buddhist perspective. We have a peace walk in August, not only to commemorate the bottom of the ocean, but to reflect on how we may make a more peaceful world. We have a sign up sheet over on that table. If you are interested in being notified of our meetings or special events, we also have a statement of our mission and our activities, one page over there on the table. There is also a pledge about things we could do, we intend to do to make a more sustainable life. There are lots of books, information relevant to this topic on the tables, the tables over there especially. And there's some food over here, so please make yourself enjoy what's around and we will be coming back in about 10 minutes and have a chance to have small discussion questions for the presenters or whatever you want to discuss. As we try to help support one another to do something that is difficult in this society, not only sustainability, but simplicity. That was part of what our thought was. They looked at how cluttered our life is and how we can make it more directly connected to the source of our life, both spiritually and materially. So enjoy what's around the room, have a chance to chat with the speakers and I will sound the gong when we're ready to come back. Thank you. It's a lovely suggestion from Simon. He first wanted to ask everyone to turn their chairs facing their neighbor or a group of two or three or four whatever works and just take a few minutes for each of us to kind of publicly commit to a change that we would intend to make in our lifestyle. Maybe it was something you were thinking about before you came tonight or maybe it was something that was triggered by something that you heard tonight. But in any event, let's take a few minutes to speak to one another. We can be a little group here and however two, three, four, whatever works where you are sitting and just put our heads together and share our thoughts for a few minutes and then we'll come back to the whole circle and have discussion questions to the speakers or anybody else. I'm going to be the first one. Hello, everyone. Hi, everybody. I guess you got to go join Simon. Hi. He's got to be the first one. Yeah. I'm already nervous. That's it already. I might not, I think, I'm not very sensitive about it. I think the other part of it is the distractions that we get out of the world. That's a very good connection. I don't know the small amount of money that we get out of the world. Take the smaller money or gas money. Anyway, for a lot of people, just do so much to try to sustain whatever it's like to do it. Feel it. And I think I'm going to be able to afford something that I have coming to me for 20 acre fees. I'm so proud of my neighbors to pass me their horses. But I have a long, I've been crossed on half of it. And it's a run-out. I can't make it much smaller. I'd like to make it smaller. Much smaller. A lot of the ones I see, you know, I just imagine I'm trying to do my best. I can see 10, 20, 30 acres of land or out there. You know, once a week, it's kind of their recognition to ride their lawnmower. Ride your lawnmower. They're a robot lawnmower. Have you ever heard of a robot lawnmower? Yeah. They're a robot. And they're battery-powered. And they're solar. And what you do is you put a wire around your lawnmower and then a robot lawnmower just comes out. Both lawnmowers. And a little of its battery. It's fairly safe. Gasoline. It saves me a lot of stress. Fire. It's going to hate me. That's summer today. That's why I like it so much. What change can you make in your life? I try to bring it back. No. That's it for me. And I'm going to really answer of course, either. I need to de-quad it. I'm not sure. Don't own a car. Eat. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. Sell them online. This is what I do. Sell them online. Sell them online. No. I'm curious if I work here at St. Grover? This house we're building into the woods, there's no road access to this property, so we have permission from the neighboring property owners to park on their property. So, you know, if you buy anything, or you have furniture, groceries, or anything, it has to all be locked in. I think there are some wonderful, about a quarter of a kilometer. For the time you could line up and expand those conversations to share our circle. Our full circle. Does anyone have a question or comment they'd like me to go up with? Yes, Anne. It seemed to me in our discussions that one of the hardest things to define is literally to define what is sustainability. That's been said, you know, so succinctly initially. What, within a, what definition does each of us individually have of what is sustainable? And then bring that to a larger collective as we have here and even further out into the world. It seems to me to be taking, doing a lot. We have a lot of work to do. Matthew. Anybody want to take a, a shot at sustainability? It was the, my sense of it, it was the great law of the Iroquois nation. In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. That's, that's one way of looking at it. Sustainable has become kind of a modern scientific term, you know, because the scientists are telling us we're destroying the planet. We're in crisis and, and we're all terrified or paralyzed or turning it off. But what, what can we do to help sustain and what does it mean? What does sustaining sustainability mean? The one thing that became clear to me tonight is it's not independence. You know, and I think that there was a time where, you know, I think some of the thinking was going in that direction. It's not that the, the community aspect which was brought up in, you know, both the first talks is really so important. And because if we're not doing that, then we're never going to get to sustainability. So that's one thing I, that's one thing I do know or believe anyway. Bob, yeah. I'm guilty of having too much stuff, you know, but I don't, and I'm trying to sell vehicles that I've acquired over the years, thinking they would be a good project. So I'm trying to find owners for them that will care for them and not have to spend a lot of money on something, buying something new. So that's kind of a recycling thing or a reusing thing. I look at it from an energy prospect that, you know, we're, instead of trying to find different ways to create or maintain the level of energy that we have coming in, we really need to cut it in half, you know. I usually stay 100, 200 kilowatt hours a month, but then we acquire an electric vehicle, so that's taking a little bit more. So instead of using fossil fuels, it's going to be fueled by the sun, which also has to have things manufactured by fossil fuels. And, you know, it's just trying to, I think, think about the embedded energy and everything that we touch or everything that we acquire or everything that we use is very important. And I don't think that we're going to go from this lifestyle to that lifestyle, but as you were talking about, you've had a pair of down cheese, you know. We don't need it at our house, but we have a fish eater and we have cheese eaters and that kind of thing. So that's something to look at. Not building our house out in the away from the village would probably have been better than, would have been better to be further southern that was in the middle of town. This is not a guilt evening. It's very easy to get into guilt and shame around this topic. And we really were hoping that this would be a time for encouragement and inspiration and feeling a little more like I can do something because it's so easy to beat ourselves up feeling guilty about what we do or what we don't do. I'll try to put it in two sentences. Okay. So if we could weigh the consideration of how we do things, whether we have to purchase it or don't have to purchase it, whether we can do without this, I think that's one thing. And then the other way thing to do is to try to spread the word and live by the example that you'd like three of your friends to start doing. That's the more difficult thing. Any other not necessarily thoughts on sustainability? We didn't talk much about simplicity tonight, but that was part of our title. Or questions to the presenters or questions to the rest of the group. Beth? I just wanted to comment that when you live in a smaller home and when you are part of a community, no matter if it's three people or 30 people, then you can share things and we will have that in our place in Maine. But you reduce your, you don't need much income and then you have this barter system where you can trade services and tools and food and well I'm going to grow tomatoes and you're going to grow squash and all that sort of things. I find that it is so liberating not to be tied to a job to have income for the stuff. The house, the car, the mortgage, in my case the health insurance. It was unaffordable so I just said I'm not going to have it anymore. But so many people, especially our young people here, money is such a worry. It's like if you simplify your life so that you don't need the stuff that you would have to work to pay for, it's just this huge weight off. I mean at my age though if I would have figured this out 30 years ago it would have been great. So I do hope you feel kind of empowered and you can move forward with a much simpler life than probably most of us except for you. He wins the sustainability prize. Just to add on to that, once we have achieved a certain level of simplicity what does that leave room for? What are we available to add which is a really quality of life which means a lot of an aware. One of my commitments, what I really want to do is just again continue to cut back on the stuff and so when there's less around me I'm finding the space is then available for other things to move in for something more creative, connecting the stillness to quiet rather than the distractions of too many things. So that's kind of been my ongoing challenge and I'm going to keep working with it. I don't know if I can decrease by five but I love that. Just to kind of get some sense of like each of us know what's too much for us. I'll sort of reiterate but at least for me and for us I haven't found, maybe it's just because we're doing it wrong, but I haven't found that pursuing this lifestyle has really made my life simpler. I do think it's made it more complex in a lot of ways but those ways are actually really really rewarding and I guess what I mean by that is like the more creating a little bit more of that space and the time to have awareness of sort of what's happening around me and to be observed and sort of be present with that actually brings me a greater sense of awareness of sort of the interconnectedness and to me that's actually a more sort of complex way of seeing the world honestly and so in a way like all of that stuff and certainly we have plenty of stuff but probably less than a lot of families of four in contemporary America. All of that stuff is in and of itself sort of a distraction from the true sort of, I don't know if this makes any sense, but the true nature of the world and the interaction and the complexity of all of those relationships. So that's part I think of what I mean when I say like this to me does not feel like a simple life. It feels complex to me. It also is, you know, we as a family of four have lived right at the poverty level for a long time and I want to be able to sit here and celebrate that and say that's great and it's also kind of exhausting sometimes. That's the honest truth. This is kind of exhausting and there are times when I'd actually rather have more money and have and there's so there's this to me all of these conversations about money and simplicity and sustainability are really, really nuanced and in my estimation and experience anyway did not lead themselves to simple answers. Do not lead themselves to simple answers. That's for me in my experience right now. If you read Ben's book, at least the homesteading one, you will see how every choice is based on a principle. It's a very conscious living and consciousness does make life more complex. If you know where your food comes from that changes, it changes everything and it's a burden to have to be aware of all those things but if we're not eating mindfully then we're eating mindlessly. So it's mindfulness is to me really part of the picture to understand where things come from. What are the causes? What are the effects? And also my thing that I decided I need to change has to do with mental stuff than that I need to meditate more regularly to get some of the mental stuff out of there so I can deal with the stuff that's outside. I'm sort of fascinated by what you were bringing forward about complexity and it occurs to me that one way of looking at it is we're all involved with these, like it's very simple for us to go to the supermarket and purchase things. For us it's simple but actually what we're involved with is extremely complex. We're externalizing the complexity. We just exported it. So when we have that, we have a higher degree of complexity which is associated with the provision of our necessities, it's really part of our world in a way that we're not aware of. Now you're aware of it. But he's aware that he's incorporated it in his life. Yeah but that which he's incorporating is much simpler than that which someone else might be incorporating by purchasing their food from that's shipped from Chile or whatever. Right but the question is, as an older person, what's he going to do when he gets older, his family gets older? Yeah, that is a great question. I would like to hear the answer to that. I don't have the answer, I have no idea. I have the answer. When he gets older and his family gets older, the American society will have collapsed. You're wrong. And so everyone will be saying, this person has an island of sanity and you can learn from that. Well, it may be but in order to have the world I think we all like, we've got to get a consensus as to where we collectively, the minority, extreme minority, want to go singly or collectively. And I was looking at the books over here and they're all written with a lot of truth but there's some contradiction. I mean like your milk and cows, I tried goats which I think are much more efficient animal and I love them more than the cow. That's the most important thing really. I love them because I can trim their hooks and so on. Right. And I can milk, they only got two teats instead of four. What the heck. But the question is, where can we as a minority take all that knowledge that's in those books and have a collective system that we can say, hey, it works. And I haven't seen that. That's what puzzles me. I mean, you're on the spiritual end, which I think is great. And you're on the self-sufficiency end and you're on the base plant food end, which is somewhat contradictory. But how can we incorporate all of it into a lifestyle? Maybe I'm too old to start, but I don't know. But I know my children aren't into it and I can't convince them. So it's a real puzzle in life. I'm just like ready to explode. Just like you could simplify your life so much if you didn't have all the chores related to the animals. Yes, that is true. And I would wake up in the morning and I would be so sad. You could still have the cow. You could still have the cow. I don't actually think. Well, one of the couple of things. One, I think the sort of contradictions are what make this life interesting and that people can live very different ways and come to very different conclusions and those ways can actually be made perhaps workable for them. I also don't think the contradictions are quite as stark as they may seem at first glance, honestly. But I don't know. Those are just my thoughts. And yeah, that's what I'm saying. And I don't know. I mean, I do think a lot about what does it look like? I'm 46 right now, which is old enough to imagine that it's possible to be older, right? I mean, you spend a lot of time until you get to your 40 and you can't even imagine that you're ever going to be 70 years old, but something happens in your 40s and all of a sudden it's like, oh, right, that might actually happen to me too. So I do think, hence my comment about making money and what that looks like. And we're really, really blessed and privileged in a lot of ways. We have this amazing piece of land and infrastructure. We have a lot of skills. We have no money. And I don't want to sell my place, our place to, you know. So I don't know what that looks like. You're not going to give me any answers. You know, there's just more questions. You dive into this stuff and all there are are more questions, which is kind of why it's so much fun. I think, right? The answers were also, like, ready and apparent. This wouldn't be nearly as juicy to talk about. Right? That's very least. I think when I find myself really confused about what is the right way, I think the best thing for me to do is just to come back to maybe that original quote, you know, just coming back to your heart and sitting in stillness if you have, you know, as part of your practice or being out in nature or, you know, moving through the world if you love, you know, if you're kind of an athlete or whatever, whatever that is that takes you back to, you know, kind of what sparks joy and what comes from the outside and goes through us, you know, and lives through us and out into the world. You know, I just think that's the only place for me to get out of like, oh my God, what's the right thing to do, you know, and trying to balance itself with, you know, the future seven generations or whatever. So, yeah, that's kind of what I've arrived at as, you know, not trying to think it all out, but appreciate the diversity in all the questions that come up and the information that's shared and then find where do I sit in this and if I keep my heart in the right place. I even look at that quote over there, you know, from the church, we are all connected, stronger together, loves hands in the world, called to create justice and responsible for one another and the earth, you know, like if we can have a vision that's not just about this self, but that's bigger, we'll find, you know, I trust that we'll find our way and it'll look different. It might look like two different diets. I bet on both diets and one worked for me for a while and wouldn't at all now. So, you know, like, so, then I do my part and I keep remembering all of you and all my grandchildren in this planet. Thank you. I'm afraid we need to start vacating the church so that was a lovely last word. And I thank you all for just your presence here. It's really very encouraging to be in a group of people who are thinking deeply about these questions. So, thank you. Thank you.